Simpy Chichimichi

People sometimes ask me how Simpy is different from del.icio.us beyond the obviously prettier UI. Here is my answer to one such question from last night:

> Why is Simpy better than del.icio.us? It isn't nearly as ugly, but is that all?

Oh, no, the nice UI is just something that a lot of people comment on.

The other advantages of Simpy over del.icio.us that people like is the ability to actually find something in Simpy once you tag and save it. That is because Simpy provides full-text search, just like Google or Gmail. You can search any of the fields (titles, tags, nicknames, annotations), but also the indexed full-text content of your bookmarks. With Simpy you can use all Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), +, and - to require and prohibit search terms, you can use phrase and fuzzy queries, etc. When you have a few hundred or few thousand links saved, this is an absolute must if you want to be able to find something you saved month or years ago. Del.icio.us only lets you "search" for tags, and only lets you combine tags (foo+bar), calling it a tag intersection, when in fact it's just a conjunctive (AND) Boolean query. You cannot exclude tags with del.icio.us, you cannot combine them, you cannot search for phrases, and so on. If my information is out of date, please let me know.

Consequently, finding a link with Simpy feels natural and a lot like searching the Web using Google or Yahoo.

You can also search anyone else's public bookmarks, which brings up private vs. public links. Simpy let's you have both public and private bookmarks, while with del.icio.us you are forced to share all your bookmarks. I won't go into detailed numbers, but a significant percentage of bookmarks in Simpy are private.

Simpy also lets you save, tag, and again full-text search free-text Notes. You can add a note via a bookmarklet, and if you've selected any text of the page, the add form will be pre-populated, which makes it super-easy to add a note.

Another nice feature of Simpy are Topics. Topics are like Inbox in del.icio.us, but while with del.icio.us you are limited to a single Inbox, with Simpy you can have multiple Topics. This is important when you subscribe to make than just a few people, and want to track people who bookmark different types of links (e.g. one set of users may be linux/KDE/open-source people, another may be people who bookmark links about blogs and RSS, another group may consist of people interested in food, nutrition, and healthy lifestyle, for example). Moreover, Topics come with Topic Filters. Topic Filters are essentially saved searches against all people in a given Topic. You can have any number of Topics, and each Topic can have any number of Topic Filters.

With Simpy people are not forced to write_tags_like_this, NorLikeThis. You can simply use multi-word tags with a comma as a separator. For example: KDE, open source, web browser, Linux

Simpy's search uses stemming, so the often cited problem of tags regarding singular vs. plural tag forms is not a problem. A search for "web browsers" will also find links tagged with "web browser", for instance.

There are other differences, advantages, but also disadvantages of Simpy. To be fair, Simpy's current feature set supports limited cross-user functionality, but that is about to change...